Re: [asa] ID, TE, and the culture war--who is the audience?

>>> <mrb22667@kansas.net> 04/27/07 3:37 PM >>>writes:
What about rephrasing the comparison this way: The ID people are
attempting a
slam-dunk on the athiests, while the TE's are trying to block the apparent
slam
dunk claimed by the atheists. "debunk the slam dunk" In house cleanup
is
important to this chore because so much of YECism seems to confirm the
atheist
charge that Christianity and science are at war.

Ted replies:
I would say that this is too defensive a picture of TE, relative to YEC.
Obviously TEs think that YEC science is about as bad as it can get, and
ought to be debunked. But I am mainly thinking here of TE as a religious
response to scientific atheism--that is, the type of TE we find in someone
like Polkinghorne (whose picture of God is mostly orthodox), John Haught
(whose picture of God is much less orthodox), or George Murphy (closer to P
than to Haught, I would say). That is, given the charge (from atheists)
that the universe is both pointless and full of pointless suffering, what is
the point? Partly that charge is rooted in "Darwinism," as ID folks call
it, but partly it is also rooted in the dark side of human experience. I
think esp of someone like Steven Weinberg, whose father died of Alzheimer's
disease and who lost a lot of relatives to Hitler's ovens. As Weinberg
himself has said, physics isn't much help when it comes to finding purpose
in the universe.

To some extent, YECs might be the audience for IDs, also--ID can appear to
YECs (if, and only if, the cosmic fine tuning piece is crossed out) like a
very useful tool, and TDI has been more than a little grateful for the help,
despite the accurate statements they make that ID is not YEC.

ted

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Received on Fri Apr 27 16:36:23 2007